by Sara Baume
‘SIR!’
The brown man startles me. I take the paper bag and bolt through the door without looking up again. Inside the car, the smell of chips is deliciously suffocating. We eat so fast we wound our tongues. Now you lick the grease from the empty punnets. You propel them up and down the back seat, and up and down again.
From the radio, an expert is telling us how most of our waters are unlicensed, as though they ought to be licensed, as though every grounded thing is licensed. The trees and bogs and heather and hills and mountains. And now I remember that you should be licensed. I remember I never licensed you.
We sleep in gateways, a new gateway every night.
And every evening, you watch the wraparound cinema screen until the mulch and stretch has warped into our lacklustre reflection. Until, in the arid light, the most familiar things grow sinister. The roving football becomes a mannequin’s head and the sound of the tomatoes softly nudging one another becomes a mutinous mumbling. Now you cave into the hollow of the seat and rest your beard against the blanket. You sigh, laboriously, and I take your laborious sigh as a cue. I begin my look-out for a tangled boreen with a gateway: a left-behind gateway, a deadended gateway, a safe-seeming gateway. The gates are mostly welded metal slats. Sometimes scabbed by rust, sometimes wired into an electric fence and ominously droning. Now here’s a gate which is hardly a gate at all, just a symbolic barrier. It’s slapdashed together with disintegrating pallets, chicken wire, the disparate pieces of a fallen tree. Here’s penny-cress, angelica and a hare over in the field. Stiff as a garden ornament. Now it barrels off, breaks into a succession of long vaults over the stubble of harvested grain, between the bales. Did you see it, did you see the hare?
I shunt the car a little back, a little forth, a little back, a little forth. Tonight, it takes forever to get properly tucked in from the road. I feel the unstable ground caving beneath the wheels and I wonder if we’ll be able to get out again in the morning. Now you’re up from the seat hollow and standing to attention. You’re making your excitement noise. This is your favourite part of the evening, my favourite part of the evening too. Now I let you out to explore the night’s gateway and its nebulous surrounds. While you are exploring, I fetch our groceries from the boot and set up the gas cooker on the flattest part of the bonnet. I take out the saucepan, plates, fork, spoon, tin opener. Tonight it’s peas, baked beans and spaghetti hoops, a French baguette with orange cheese and marmalade. It takes a couple of tries to ignite the hob in the wind. I pull the side of my cardigan taut to shelter the lighter’s flame. On rainy nights, I do this on the passenger seat with the door open. I know it’s careless, even dangerous. The first time I lit the gas cooker inside the car, I made sure you were outside. But nothing happened, and I’ve grown reckless with the cooker since. Sometimes I don’t bother to push the passenger door open and roll the window down. In this way, the heat’s trapped inside and our car home remains warm as a burrow for much of the night.
But this evening it’s dry and only gently gusty. Blue jags spring out from the hob and contentedly purr. I always buy the ring-pull cans and cook everything together in one pan, the only pan I brought. I tear fistfuls of bread from the loaf and apportion the cooked gunk between two plates. One you-sized, one toppling. Now we scoff, scoff, scoff in the name of all our missed meals.
I rinse the supper dishes and utensils in the ditch with water from a gallon drum. We are running low on washing water. I need to find a roadside pump, a stream, a public toilet. NON POTABLE the public taps say, and so I buy bottles of the mineral stuff as well. But you don’t like the taste of minerals, you drink from field streams and mud puddles. Now I stack the supper things back in the boot. I parcel the rubbish. You lick your bits in the grass. With your pointy incisors you comb the wirebrush fur of your paws and I sit on the bonnet and smoke until it’s too cold to stay outside. Now I line tea-candles along the dash, open my book, prop it against the steering wheel, read to their twizzling light. And you climb into my lap and lie, semi-sleeping, with your dominant ear at half mast, your eyelid always raised to its sentinel slit. I read until the light has spat itself out.
‘Time for bed,’ I tell you, ‘bed.’
Bed is one amongst your sixty-five words.
Now comes sleeplessness. I wind the driver’s seat back, unroll my duvet and clout my pillow into place. On my left side with feet tucked together and hands pressed between thighs: this is as close to comfortable as it comes. I lie awake and smell your malodorous snores slowly filling the air, and I wonder can you smell me as strongly. My smoky, yeasty, heinous breath. And I wonder which organ is putrefying inside me and how it generates so sickening a stench. Every morning it sits thick and fetid between the walls of the car. It’s like all my bad habits are fermenting in an infernal pit below my mouth hole, rising up to taunt me when I’m fresh from sleep and at my most defenceless. Your snores are almost sweet and biscuity in comparison.
Is this what my father’s house smelled like? Not garlic and coffee and cigarette smoke and bins, not the old feet sweat in his slippers, not the draught through the keyhole and cracks in the ceiling plaster, but like my heinous breath instead?
It’s hard to find Amber Leaf in the village shops and petrol stations where we stop. Liquorice flavour papers are even scarcer. I buy Drum instead; they always have Drum. I don’t like the taste but I tear my tiny rectangles and smoke it anyway. I suppose this means that addiction has superseded sentiment now. I suppose this means I’m an addict.
Sometimes while we’re driving, I kill the radio and we listen to the passing world instead. Most outside sounds are smothered by the rapping of raindrops against tin, sputters rising from beneath the bonnet, a ticking here and a rattle there, the scour and chump, scour and chump, scour and chump of the wipers. Sometimes a chittering magpie peals through, the panicky moo of a ravenous cow, the angry revving of an overtaking vehicle, a faraway siren and I feel a cold flush of fear. Everybody always overtakes me, do I really drive so slowly? Sometimes when I’m thinking and sometimes when I’m not thinking, my accelerator foot relaxes, retracting from its pedal so the car barely ticks along, the gears straining. Sometimes it’s several miles or more before I notice my tailback.
The outer noises are important to me. It doesn’t matter what form they take or how loud they are, but I need to keep them always sounding. I depend on them to gag my thoughts. My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren’t loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain. I need them most of all during the hours of sleeplessness, the only time at which I can’t play the radio because it would run the car’s battery flat. In the gateways by night, unless it’s raining, there’s little noise, and all the noises are little. But they don’t sound little. Cats skulking in the hedgerows become lions. And the rustling mice they hunt, the rustling rabbits and shrews, become wildebeests and warthogs. On my left side with my feet tucked, interminably pursuing comfort, I think about my father’s house; I think about my father. I analyse my regrets in unnecessary detail with unnecessary force, and I wonder how I wound up with this life, and not somebody else’s. For a while, it’s a topic of tantalising possibility, and then, all of a sudden, it grows sickeningly boring and I’m left with a tension headache in place of an answer. A dull pounding which runs from the blades of my shoulders to the backs of my eyeballs. When I can stand the throng of sprat no longer, this is when I start my commentary.
In the latest years of my father’s life, he misplaced all of his small talk. Have I told you this already? Have I told you how, gradually, he stopped making his usual humdrum enquiries: whether the post had come yet, or if it looked like rain, or what we were having for supper that night. Maybe his mind had gone. Maybe he was an imbecile. Maybe he just didn’t see the point of wasting what breath he had left on such meaningless niceties, I can understand that. Once he had completely stopped talking, that was
the point at which I began to gabble. ‘The postman’s passed without leaving anything,’ I’d say, ‘It’s surely going to rain soon,’ I’d say, ‘What do you reckon to a chop tonight?’ I’d say. And now I address it all to you. You who never spoke anyway. You who misunderstands almost everything. I describe the things we pass even though nothing is interesting, even though I’ve already mentioned it several times over, even though I know now I sound like the imbecile.
See how each road sign has its own name. JOHN, this one’s called. It’s because the county council men abuse their spray paint when they are bored. Now MARK, JIM, R153, now JOHN again, or maybe a different JOHN. See how the farmers abuse their paint too. They spray the sheep so they can recognise members of their flock when they’re dotted across the hillside. But the damp air disperses the paint through their wool and the sheep end up pink and blue almost all over, like the sort of gigantic cuddly toys people win at fairground stalls. See a faded teddy bear slumped in the upstairs window of the tumbledown farmhouse, back turned, shunning the view. Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path.
The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.
Now, I’m gabbling, I’m sorry. I catch sight of you in the rearview mirror. You’re watching the side of my face as I speak. Head tilted left, you look perplexed. I know you don’t understand, and so I bellow a sentence made up entirely of your words.
WALKIES, BICKIES, BEDTIME I bellow, ALL GONE, WAIT, FOOTBALL, BOLD I bellow, SPEAK, ONE EYE, SPEAK.
It seems almost incredible, how far we can drive in a country so small, without ever really reaching anywhere. But then I am slow, I suppose. I forget I am slow.
How many weeks now? What day is it, what month? Sometimes you look so much as though you’re about to talk, as though you’re trying so hard to answer me. October, of course. Now it must be October. See the primary school with paper chains cut into witch shapes and strung across the windows. See the white pillowcases slung over balloons and hung by their heads from the trees at the edge of the playground.
Soon the grocery shops will be selling fat pumpkins too floury-fleshed for eating, monkey nuts roasted in their knobbled shells and elasticated plastic faces with the eyes cut out. Soon it will be the time of year when it’s vaguely acceptable to be crepuscular, to be wonkety.
I don’t know where we are, and I wonder if I took the handbrake off would the car remember for itself and roll us home again to the footpath outside the terrace of the village that hums, but I haven’t the courage to put it to the test.
I stopped following the board game weeks ago, now I’ve stopped reading the signposts too. Even though we’re lost, it seems as if you’re at ease in our car home now, as if your safe space has spread from door to door and devoured the entire seat. Now our backyard is the limitless countryside. Now our neighbours are grazing stock, hedgerow birds, hibernating mammals, an infinity of insects. No longer are we creatures of routine; now we’re creatures of possibility. I think of all the years I spent living in so many rooms and how I used to believe I needed a different room for everything. A room for preparing a meal, another for sitting down to eat in, another again for shitting the digested meal out and flushing it away through a network of pipes secreted within the plasterwork. Do you remember all of those tiny rooms between rooms with no use at all? The hall, the porch, the corridor. Rooms just for passing through, for cluttering up with a panoply of objects more purposeless than the tiny rooms themselves, do you remember? Even though I’m at ease in our car home now too, still sometimes, I miss my father’s house. I miss it more the farther we go and the less I know where we are going. Everything I remember is caught in the void between its stained carpets and slanted slates. All my memories are cast to a honeyed hue by its yellow walls.
I remember how my father used to hum. He hummed even after he’d ceased to talk. The hum was a soundtrack for whatever it was he happened to be doing: for moving, for thinking, for sitting, for smoking, for tinkering. From the needless room adjacent to his needless room I’d hear his humming leach through the plasterboard between us. It was always the same tune but I could never exactly identify it, and I never asked. Maybe my father was just repeating it wrong, like the way I always mishear the lyrics of songs which play between items on the talking station, and make up my own lines instead, substituting noises that aren’t even words. Or maybe my father’s tune was from some phase of his life which preceded fatherhood, from so many decades ago he couldn’t have identified it even if I’d summoned the question. Maybe my father’s humming was drawn from no fixed point of reference, but as involuntary as a yawn.
This might sound strange to you, but now when I think of the house, I picture it precisely as we left it, except that my father is still alive. I picture his unslippered feet planted firmly on the carpeted boards again, and he’s humming and shambling between rooms, even though the lights are out, the curtains drawn and all the appliances switched off. I picture the painted men in painted Puerto Rico bartering their cockerels on the wall behind him, the bathroom beads gently knocking against one another in his wake. And Mr Buddy behind the washing machine with his button nose pressed to the cold wall, listening as my father passes.
I lose you.
At first light in a manmade forest. Most of its trees have been felled; between each slim copse there’s an expanse of sorry stumps. Here in this clearing, there’s a solitary Scots pine left standing. Branches severed, bark stripped. It looks like a lightening bolt driven into the earth and turned to wood.
I’m contemplating the surface of a stump when I lose you. There’s some strange substance growing from it; strange because I can’t decide whether it’s a plant-like mushroom or a mushroom-like plant. After a couple of rainless days, the mud of the forest floor is pale and dry and the stump’s dead roots push through the pale, dry mud like a network of veins on the back of a skinny hand. Now see here how the old rain has made a pond beneath the upraised roots of a fallen beech.
But when I look up I can’t see you. I turn to where I think I saw you last. The clump of undergrowth where you were rummaging still holds the indentation of your disturbance. Now I kick through it, trying to go the way you could have gone, calling your name. There isn’t any path here, and I don’t know where I’m going, and I can’t see you anywhere.
ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE, I shout.
How can I know for sure you went this way? I can’t. You could have gone any way. You could have gone on. I go on.
ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE, I shout.
I use my angry voice, my angriest voice, even though I’m much more worried than I am enraged. How many minutes? Ten, fifteen, twenty? I feel sick with panic. What if you’re looking for me now too? What if you went back to the car, and are waiting? I go back.
But there isn’t any sign of you in the clearing where the car’s parked. The only different thing is a mess of bird shit across the windscreen. I stare into the empty branches of the overhead tree. I think it’s a eucalyptus, and I wonder how it ended up here and what sort of bird has made this foreign species its home. I sit on the edge of the passenger seat with the door open, facing into the forest. I wait. I know there are lots of things I could be doing as I wait. I could make coffee, read my book, check the oil, shake the blanket out. But I don’t feel like anything but sawing the hard skin
from my fingertips. I don’t look at the time on the dashboard, and the minute hand of the clock inside me grinds as though towing a grain truck in its wake.
It’s only now you’re gone I see how you’re my reason for doing things. Now I’m a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can’t remember how to walk without being precipitously propped.
Now I hear a soft tinkling coming toward me through the ferns, a grunt. Now I see your black head pushing through the green fronds.
BOLD! I yell, but I don’t mean it.
Up ahead, there’s a man standing with one foot on the tarmac and the other in the ditch gully, and he’s swaying in the wind like a bendy tree.
As we approach, I see his grey head’s bowed against the horizontal drizzle and his right hand’s stuck out into the roadway with a crooked thumb raised. It’s early in the evening on a wide stretch of back road. There’s nothing interesting on the radio and the rain’s too weak to stifle the blare of my thoughts. So I slow down, pull in just beyond the hitchhiker. I shove the gas cooker and snacks from the passenger seat into the back. I pummel my bedding a little deeper into the cranny beneath the dash.
The hitchhiker is a man about my age. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up. He’s chunky around the waist yet gangly in the limbs, sparse of hair and puffy of face. His nose is particularly bulbous and purple, scribbled with thread veins like craquelure on a masterpiece. He’s wearing no jacket, just a woollen jumper worn to thousands and thousands of fluff bobbles. ‘I’m local,’ he says, ‘just a few miles home along the road here.’ He points west. ‘Thanks very much.’
